Sunday, August 9, 2015

Religion, Roman Catholics, and the Decline of the Liberal Party

Has religion played a role in the decline
of the Liberal Party? That was a question I explored in 2011 prior to that year’s
Canadian election. As it turned out, a majority of voters from all religious persuasions
voted for other parties, including Catholics, who historically voted Liberal. A majority of Protestants, including evangelicals, voted Conservative, while people of no religion mostly found
a home with the NDP. The article below
takes a look at how the shifting religious landscape back then led to a
Conservative majority; in a future instalment, I’ll explore what might be
happening in the current election. Note: This was a feature piece in the Free Press, and is longer than my normal columns and posts.

If the Conservatives get
a majority on May 2, they may thank God—and Roman Catholic voters across the
country.

“The
Catholic vote is a key swing vote in the electorate,” Immigration Minister
Jason Kenney, was quoted as saying in the Catholic Register in January.

Kenney,
who led his party’s campaign to take capture those voters from the Liberals,
described the swing to the Conservatives as “huge” and “unprecedented.”

“The
Liberal Party dramatically abandoned its historic Catholic base and for a while
seemed to almost go out of its way to insult Catholic voters and their values,”
he said, adding that the Liberal Party “has become in many respects militantly
secularist and inhospitable to people of faith.”

That’s
a bold statement. But is it true? Does this election hinge on the votes of
Roman Catholic Church members? And have religious voters fled the Liberal
Party?

The
answer seems to be yes—not that many noticed.

While much has been written and
said about the Conservative Party’s efforts to reach out to ethnic voters, much
less has been reported about how successful that Party has been in reaching out
to religious voters, or about how large numbers of churchgoing Canadians have
abandoned the Liberal Party over the past ten or so years.

A Dramatic Shift

One person who did
notice is Andrew Grenville, Chief Research Officer for Angus Reid Public
Opinion.

Grenville,
who specializes in researching Canadian religious trends, has noticed a
profound change in the way Roman Catholics vote over the past few elections.

Since
the 1950s, he says, members of that group have been consistently more likely to
vote Liberal, both in and outside of Quebec.

The
2006 election saw a change in this historic linkage.

At
the time, “it was unclear whether this was a real shift, or a one-time
punishment of the Liberals following the sponsorship scandal,” he says.

But
subsequent research suggests “real change has occurred . . . the shifts we
first observed in 2006 have, if anything, become more pronounced, both in
Quebec and in the rest of Canada.”

The pollster found that the Roman Catholic vote for
the Liberals outside Quebec fell from 54 percent in 2000 to 31 percent in 2008.
Inside Quebec, the vote fell from 56 percent in 2004 to 22 percent.

And where did those
former Liberal supporters go? Many ended up voting for the Conservatives; in
2008, 49 percent of Catholics outside Quebec who attended church weekly voted
Conservative, Grenville says.

But the shift wasn’t unique to Catholics; something similar
happened among mainline Protestants outside Quebec.

According
to Grenville, support for the Liberals among weekly attenders of that group
fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2008. Many of those votes also
went to the Conservatives; 64 percent of church-going Protestants outside
Quebec voted for the Conservative Party that year, compared to 51 percent four
years earlier.

Others
also noticed this shift. In 2009 academics Elisabeth Gidengil of
McGill University, Patrick Fournier and André Blais at Université de Montréal,
Joanna Everitt at the University of New Brunswick and Neil Nevitte of the
University of Toronto explored this issue in The Anatomy of a Liberal
Defeat.

In the paper the researchers noted that “Catholic voters, once a
pillar of support that helped keep the Liberals a dominant force in Canadian
politics, have steadily shifted their allegiances in recent years so that the
party can no longer count on their votes.”

They
went on to say that “controlling for other social background characteristics
reveals that the drop in Liberal support among Catholics is even more dramatic
than the loss of visible minority votes.”

In
2006, “Catholics were as likely to vote Conservative as Liberal,” they noted.
“In 2008, they clearly actually preferred the Conservatives to the Liberals . .
. the Liberals can no longer take the support of Catholics or visible
minorities for granted."

What Happened?

What
caused this shift? Why did large numbers of people flee the Liberal Party for
the Conservatives?

For
Grenville, it started with the sponsorship scandal in 2006. “The cheating
and corruption really hurt the Liberals,” he says, adding that Liberal Party
support for same-sex marriage and abortion widened the gap.

The
academics behind Anatomy of a Liberal
Defeat suggest something similar, although they say same-sex marriage was
not the deciding factor for Roman Catholics in the 2004 and 2006 elections
(although abortion played a role in 2006). But that all changed in 2008.

That
year, they say, “Catholics who oppose same-sex marriage
were less likely to vote Liberal.” And, for the first time, “Catholics who
believe the Bible is the literal word of God were significantly less likely to
vote Liberal."

For
Catholic journalist and blogger Debra Gyapong, it wasn’t just the issue of
same-sex marriage that cost Liberals support from Roman Catholics, but their “ramming the redefinition
of marriage through Parliament.”

She
also points to the Liberal Party’s “partisan messaging that painted traditional
marriage supporters as un-Canadian and anti-Charter, and that attacked
Christian voters in general.”

“Self-inflicted” wounds

John
McKay, the Liberal Member of Parliament who represents the Ontario riding of
Scarborough-Guildwood, agrees with those sentiments.

McKay
acknowledges that support from Catholics and other church-goers for the Liberal
Party is “bleeding away.” What’s worse, he adds, the wound was
“self-inflicted.”

“You can disagree with someone, but you don’t
have to insult them,” he says of the times when the Liberal Party had different
views from some religiously-inclined Canadians. “There are times that the
Liberal Party has been disagreeable in its disagreements.”

Not
only did the Liberal Party take support by religious voters for granted, he acknowledges,
it also treated them dismissively over issues such as same-sex marriage and
abortion.

Attacking Conservatives as religious zealots who could not be trusted
on social issues didn’t help, either.

That
includes the infamous pre-election poll question the Liberal Party commissioned
in 2004 asking if voters would be more or less likely to vote for the
Conservatives if they knew the party had been "taken over by evangelical
Christians."

McKay,
who attends an Evangelical church in Toronto, was quoted at the time as saying
the tactic was "antithetical to everything I believe as a Liberal."

"Either we think that we have an inclusive notion of pluralism in this
country where we accept people based upon their religion or we are
hypocrites," he said.

“I just think it has no place in Canadian politics
and, in addition to being offensive ideologically, it is just plain stupid
politics."

In
2009 Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff asked McKay to start the work of
rebuilding bridges between the Party and Canada’s faith communities.

Since
then, he’s been busy visiting various faith group leaders and attending
religious events—and also arranging meetings between Ignatieff and the leaders
of Canadian faith groups.

When
it comes to attracting religious voters, McKay admits that the Conservatives
have done a better job. The Liberal Party, he says, “need to be more attuned to
the religious community. We have a lot of catching up to do.”

A “fatal flaw” for Liberals and the NDP

Ron
Dart isn’t surprised that Conservatives and Liberals are reaching out to
religious voters.

“Religion
has a profound effect on the way people vote,” says Dart, who teaches political
science, philosophy and religious studies at the University of the Fraser
Valley in Abbotsford, B.C.

The
“fatal flaw” for the Liberals—and the NDP, he adds—is that members of those two
parties “assume we live in a secular society,” or that “religion is dying, a
relic of the past.”

They
acted, he says, like religion “was going to disappear,” or that it was fine as
long as people kept it “to their private life”—an assumption that can hurt them
at election time.

Conservatives,
on the other hand, “never bought into that. They have explicitly courted these
folks.”

McKay
agrees.

“We
think we live in a secular society—we don’t,” he says. “Lots of Canadians
expect their faith will play a role in public discourse. We have to come to
grips with that as a society.”

People
of faith, he adds, “want to be listened to, and speak freely. They don’t want
to be denigrated and devalued with they speak from a faith basis.”